The Tale of Castle Cottage (7 page)

The badger, accustomed to the Professor’s method of beginning a conversation, replied,
“Quite well, thank you. We’re having a picnic.”

“Actually, we’ve just had it,”
Primrose explained.
“We’ve been celebrating Parsley’s birthday.”

The owl brightened.
“Very goood,”
he intoned.
“I say, a bit of birthday cake wooouldn’t come amiss.”

“I’m sorry, Professor,”
Primrose said regretfully.
“I’m afraid we’ve finished it off. If we’d known you were coming, we would have been glad to save you a piece.”
She paused.
“But do come back this evening. We’re having ginger and treacle pudding for dessert. And I believe that your dragon friend, Thorvaald, will be joining us”

The owl was exceedingly partial to ginger and treacle pudding.
“Wooonderful!”
he exclaimed happily.
“I shall plan on returning this evening, then.”
He bowed to Parsley, who had joined the group.
“Please accept my best birthday wishes, my dear.”
Without waiting for her reply, he turned back to Bosworth.
“I have come with news, ooold chap.”

“What sort of news?”
Bosworth asked, immediately concerned.
“Not bad news, I hope.”

I am not surprised at Bosworth’s question, for there have been any number of upsets in the neighborhood in recent times. A threatened footpath closing, a terrible accident at Oat Cake Crag, poison pen letters that nearly derailed the vicar’s wedding to Mrs. Lythecoe—and worst of all, a beastly hydroplane that buzzed noisily up and down the lake, wreaking all kinds of havoc. The wretched thing was destroyed in a mysterious storm (with the help of Thorvaald, an ambitious young dragon), but not before the First Lord of the Admiralty, Mr. Churchill, had come down from London to inspect it. He must have liked what he saw, because not long after, it was reported that a similar flying machine was being fitted with guns and readied for possible war use.

War! At the thought, the old badger shuddered. A former ship’s cat—a large, muscular creature with a sleek orange coat and a jaunty green mate’s cap—had stopped in at teatime several days before. He had taken passage on a freighter carrying grain from Le Havre to Liverpool and then hopped a goods lorry to visit his relatives in the northern Cumbria. The cat had reported that war with Germany was now being spoken of openly in France and Brussels and elsewhere, and that everyone seemed quite keen on the prospect. But the news had sobered the animals around the table, and the thought of war had chilled Bosworth to the bone.

“Oh, nooo, not bad news at all,”
the owl hastened to assure the badger. He beamed.
“In fact, I daresay yooou will be delighted to hear it, I happened tooo fly over Slatestone Cottage shortly after dawn this morning, checking to see if the little rabbits in the neighbor’s garden had ventured out of their nest as yet. I heard a baby cry and went tooo have a looook in the window. Deirdre and Jeremy Crosfield have a new little boy.”

“A boy!”
Primrose exclaimed happily.
“How wonderful. What have they named him?”

The Professor cast a twinkling glance at the little dog.
“I believe I overheard Deirdre call him Rascal. But please dooon’t quote me. I am occasionally wrong. Not often, mind. Just every now and then.”

“Rascal?”
Rascal sat up straight, his eyes wide with disbelief.
“They’re calling their baby boy . . . Rascal?”

“I wonder why,”
Hyacinth murmured ironically.

But of course they all knew that Rascal had been Jeremy’s special friend—sometimes his
only
friend—for a good many years. Jeremy returned Rascal’s affection and had even invited the little dog into the church when he and Deirdre were married. Unfortunately, the vicar had not approved this idea, but Rascal had fully enjoyed himself at the wedding party, where Deirdre had tied a satin ribbon around his neck and asked him to join in the dancing.

“It hardly seems possible that our Jeremy is a dad,”
Rascal muttered. Embarrassed, he turned away to hide the sudden mist in his eyes.
“Seems daft, maybe, but I still think of him as a lad, rambling through the fells with his sketch book and charcoal.”
He scrambled to his feet.
“Well, now. I think I’ll just trot on over to Slatestone Cottage and have a quick look in. P’rhaps they have an errand or two that wants running.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t,”
Primrose said quickly.
“Mum and Dad will have their hands full with the new babe, you know. Wait a few hours and let them get settled, and they’ll be all the gladder to see you.”

“I suppose you’re right,”
Rascal said reluctantly.
“Well, then, p’rhaps I’ll go back down to the village and see who’s out and about and what they’re up to. Cheerio.”
And off he went.

The owl put his flying goggles back on.
“I must be off myself.”
He sighed.
“A pity about that cake. I shall try tooo be more prompt next year. And I shall look forward tooo this evening.”
And with two great flaps of his huge wings, he lifted himself into the sky, circled once, and flew in the direction of Claife Heights.

And we shall take ourselves off, too, and follow Rascal to the village. It will soon be time for Miss Potter to meet Mr. Heelis. I don’t know about you, but I would like to see the two of them together again. I don’t want to miss their meeting, especially since it is to take place at Castle Farm, which (since it is the title of our book) must be an important part of our story.

4

Miss Potter Surveys a Mess

[Castle Cottage] has been in such an
awful mess
. The new rooms are nothing like built yet & the old part has been all upset with breaking doors in the wall & taking out partitions. Those front rooms . . . are one long room now & the staircase is altered & we are going to have a bathroom—in the course of time—I think workmen are very slow.

 

 

If Miss Potter had what we moderns would call a “pet peeve,” it would most likely be day-trippers. Even in her time, there were quite a few, especially in July and August, when people hoped to escape the stifling heat of the cities by coming to the Lake District. All summer long, the coaches and charabancs were crowded, noisy motorcars chugged up Ferry Hill, and dozens of bicyclists and fell-walkers puffed along the lane. The local residents made a little money from this tourist traffic, no doubt, but they were no end annoyed by it.

And if Miss Potter could see today’s traffic in her quiet little village, she would be exceedingly annoyed, for it often feels as if Sawrey is completely overrun. On a fine midsummer afternoon, for instance, you are likely to find the streets and lanes crowded with swarms of visitors, especially if you have arrived at the same time as one of the tourist buses, some of which are the size of a Sawrey cottage! But because you’re a modern person, you are used to traffic and tourists and you won’t (I trust) let the throngs diminish your enjoyment of this picturesque little village, which looks very much as it did in Miss Potter’s day.

If you’re visiting Hill Top, you will likely cross Windermere on the ferry, just as Miss Potter herself did. You will drive up Ferry Hill and through Far Sawrey. When you arrive in Near Sawrey, you will be directed by a uniformed traffic minder to put your automobile in the car park about two hundred yards from Hill Top, which is now owned and maintained by the National Trust. You will walk along Kendal Road, past Buckle Yeat Guest Cottage (do stop and admire the beautiful baskets of colorful petunias and blue lobelia and red and pink geraniums maintained by the friendly cottage hosts) and the Tower Bank Arms, where there is a wreath of pink roses blooming around the old clock above the front door.

If it’s mealtime and you’re feeling peckish, you may be tempted by the pub menu posted outside the Tower Bank’s green-painted front door. You might consider a Cumberland sausage (supplied by Woodall’s of Waberthwaite, purveyors of traditional Cumberland sausage, by appointment to HM Queen Elizabeth II), served with mashed potatoes and onion gravy. Or perhaps you would prefer the Cumbrian beef and ale stew with herb dumplings, also recommended. If you’re in the mood for dessert, try the sticky toffee pudding (wonderful!). And if the day is foggy or chilly, you can toast your toes at the fire in the grate of the old fireplace or sit at the bar and warm yourself with a half-pint of fine local ale. You will find that the old pub looks much as it did a century ago, when it was the center of the village social life, a place to barter and trade, to hear the latest news, to play a game of darts or cards, and to complain about the weather and taxes.

After your visit to the pub, you will want to get on to Hill Top, where you must expect to wait for admission. The house is now a museum, and only a certain number of people are allowed to purchase tickets and go inside at any one time. While you wait, you can browse in the gift shop, admire Miss Potter’s cottage garden—a delightfully haphazard jumble of herbs, flowers, and vegetables—or look over the fence toward the lovely green hill where Tibbie and Queenie, Miss Potter’s Herdwick ewes, once raised their annual families of rambunctious little lambs. While you’re waiting, you’re sure to hear conversations in a half-dozen different languages, for children of all nationalities have read Miss Potter’s Little Books and now, grown up and with their own youngsters in tow, have come to visit the place where she lived.

But I’m about to tell you something that most people don’t know, for Miss Potter’s
real
home in Sawrey was not Hill Top Farm; it was Castle Cottage. Hill Top was very dear to her heart, it is true. She could retreat there from London and her parents, and she wrote and drew many of her little books there. But the house itself was rather like a holiday cottage, and she was rarely able to spend more than a fortnight there at any given time.

In actuality, Beatrix Potter’s real home was Castle Cottage, where she spent the last thirty years of her life. After you’ve toured the house at Hill Top and you’re walking back in the direction of the car park, glance up the hill to the north (to your right), past the other houses in the village. The large white house at the top of the hill—slate roof, whitepainted chimneys with red top hats, red-trimmed windows, and a porch with a skylight—is Castle Cottage. To get there, you will walk up the lane, past the row of cottages that used to include Ginger and Pickles’ village shop and Rose Cottage and the joiner’s workshop and the blacksmith’s forge and Croft End Cottage. At the corner, turn to the right, then turn left when you reach Post Office Meadow, and walk up the hill to Castle Cottage. Neither the house nor the grounds are open to the public. But as you stand at the gate and peek into the garden, perhaps you can imagine Miss Potter, dressed in her gray Herdwick tweeds and her old black felt hat, a woven basket over her arm and clippers in hand, coming out of the door and stepping into the green and neatly kept garden, with blooming flowers and trimmed hedges behind a stone fence.

So. That is Castle Cottage as it is now.

It did not look that way on this particular July afternoon in 1913, however. Beatrix, dressed in those same tweeds and black felt hat, is taking the same route to Castle Cottage that I have just described. But the village is not yet a tourist destination—if it were, I daresay that Miss Potter would have found another place to live straightaway!—and as she comes down the steep walk from Hill Top (the path is behind the Tower Bank Arms), there are only a few people about. Harry Turnell, the brewer’s drayman, in his leather apron, shirt sleeves rolled past the elbows, is delivering kegs of beer and ale to the Tower Bank Arms. Robert Franklin, wearing his handwoven rush farmer’s hat, trundles a wooden wheelbarrow loaded with two red hens and a rooster in a wooden cage. And a pair of fell-walkers in short pants and knee stockings, kitted out with knapsacks and walking sticks and pert green felt hats, are striding along as boldly as if they are setting out to climb the Matterhorn instead of merely hiking up Coniston Old Man, on the other side of Esthwaite Water.

Miss Potter barely noticed, however. She was in an exceedingly perplexed frame of mind, for what Sarah Barwick had told her as they finished lunch now lay like an ominous shadow across her thoughts. The theft of a pair of door handles seemed almost trivial enough to overlook, although she thought she really ought to do something about it.

But what? Whatever she did was bound to cause some sort of trouble—and if she did nothing, that could cause trouble, too, in the end. And not trivial trouble, either. What if she weren’t the only victim? What if other of Mr. Biddle’s clients were being robbed, too? Or perhaps there was no truth to the story at all. She was perfectly aware of the various ways the truth could be stretched out of shape, once it got into the village gossip mill.

She was still mulling over this problem when, in front of the village shop, she met Mrs. Regina Rosier, an acquaintance from nearby Hawkshead. Mrs. Rosier was recently retired from teaching in the grammar school there (the same school where the poet William Wordsworth, as a boy, had carved his name into the top of his desk). Dressed in tweeds and stout boots, with a wide-brimmed straw hat on her chestnut hair, a pair of birding glasses around her neck, and a camera in her capacious bag, Mrs. Rosier was obviously out to photograph birds. She was an excellent photographer and had received several awards for her fine work.

“Oh, Miss Potter!” Mrs. Rosier exclaimed, her words tumbling out breathlessly. “I am so very delighted to see you. I’ve been meaning to call. I have just recently learnt of your engagement to Mr. Heelis. He is such a fine, dear man, so widely respected by all. Perhaps you know that he and his cousins live very close to me, and I have heard—”

Mrs. Rosier stopped, frowning a little and biting her lip, for she had very nearly let slip what a neighbor had whispered to her, that Mr. Heelis’ cousins were not pleased with his choice. “That is,” she corrected herself, “I have heard that you’re to be married soon. Please accept my very best wishes. I am sure you will be quite, quite happy.”